This is sample from the essay ‘The Chinese Maritime Customs Service and the China Trade’
by Professor Robert Bickers, University of Bristol
China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980. © Adam Matthew Digital Ltd. 2008

‘The Chinese Maritime Customs Service and the China Trade’
Professor Robert Bickers, University of Bristol

The foreign inspectorate of the Customs was established in Shanghai in 1854 to deal with the impact on foreign trade of the twin crises of national and local rebellion around the city. [1]  Initially, the three main treaty powers (Britain, France and the United States), each seconded a consular official as an Inspector, Britain’s being Thomas Francis Wade (then Shanghai vice-consul). As the immediate local crisis passed the advantages of a system of contracting out to foreigner supervision the assessment of duties on foreign imports and exports led Qing officials to agree to a permanent foreign-staffed inspectorate. Horatio Nelson Lay (1832-1898), the ambitious young British son of missionary parents, had been appointed British Inspector of Customs in Shanghai, replacing Wade, on 31 May 1855, and on 1 July 1859 was appointed Inspector-General of a Service that was being set on a permanent footing and extended to all the treaty ports. That expansion was underpinned by the 1858 ‘Rules of Trade’, appended to the Treaty of Tianjin, that called for ‘one uniform service’ to be ‘enforced at every port’. As the Treaty of Tianjin and the 1860 Convention of Peking brought to a close the Second Anglo-Chinese or ‘Opium’ War, opening up new ports on the Yangtze and in north China, this became a pressing issue. Lay set about establishing the service on a rational footing, poaching James Duncan Campbell from the British Treasury to be chief secretary and auditor, overseeing the expansion of the Shanghai model, and dealing with the sharp tensions that arose as existing vested local interests, Chinese and foreign, adapted with ill-grace to the new system. [2]

Lay, however, was an arrogant figure, who exceeded his authority in the ‘Lay-Osborn flotilla’ affair, and this led to his downfall. The Inspector General proposed the creation of a fleet of foreign steamers to aid the Qing in the suppression of the on-going Taiping rebellion (1850-65), and the endemic disorder that it caused, notably coastal piracy. The Court approved the plan, but Lay issued instructions appointing British naval officer Captain Sherard Osborn commander of the fleet, enjoining Osborn to receive his instructions only from the Inspector General, and Lay reserved the right to refuse to transmit any from the Court that he disagreed with. Lay had failed to accept the logic of his changing position, that he was now a servant of the Chinese state, and that he had no cause therefore to select which of its orders he would obey. To add to the problem of negotiating a solution to this impasse – the Court objected very strongly to these instructions, in which Lay clearly exceeded his authority - Osborn was no more a diplomat than his putative superior. Lay was dismissed in November 1863, the fleet disbanded, and Robert Hart, who had transferred to the customs from the British consular service in 1859 was appointed Inspector-General from 15 November 1863. [3]

Robert Hart turned what had been a contingent ad hoc innovation into a powerful, efficient and national agency of the Qing state. One measure of its expansion would be the numbers of new stations: by 1864 there were fourteen Customs stations, by 1877, nineteen. By 1905 there were thirty-six and by January 1931 forty-seven. Subject to caveat, each station represented a port, and sometimes a district, directly opened to international trade. But in addition the Customs was always more than a mere revenue-collecting agency. Hart and the team of administrators, engineers, and marine staff, that he recruited collected a wider and wider range of duties, developed navigation and lighthouse systems, ordered treaty port harbours, negotiated treaties, collected, collated and published reams of trade and other statistics (notably meteorological data), and sponsored the publication of works of geography, history, linguistics, medicine, and even ethno-musicology. The Customs represented China at international fairs until 1905, took on the Chinese Post Office, and was also a tool of Qing imperialism in Korea – the Korean Customs was reorganised under Customs control from 1885 onwards. [4]  Hart welded his cosmopolitan staff together into a body of men wedded to a strong service ethos and strong service loyalties. This was achieved as much by autocratic whimsy as by socialisation, and was the stuff of much legend and self-regard, but it had a tangible effect on the nature and efficiency of the Service.

Hart remained at the helm in effect until 1908, and in name until 1911. [5]  We know a great deal about Hart, despite the destruction of the Inspectorate Archives in 1900 during the siege of the Peking Legations, not only because a subordinate carted to safety the 77 volumes of Hart’s private journals, but because he had since 1874 been corresponding with Campbell, who had been appointed Non-Resident Secretary in London. These letters and telegrams tell us much about the work of that office – which attended to ‘the procuring and forwarding of all official supplies’, as well as recruitment. But Campbell was also enjoined to ‘performing the special duties confided to him by the Inspector General’ (Circ. 3/1874, 30 Jan. 1874), and Hart’s letters speak his mind on internal service as well as diplomatic and international affairs as often as they deal with the technical functions of the Office. Hart also used Campbell as his private agent, and without this correspondence we would know far less about Hart’s thoughts and Customs issues than we would otherwise. His sole publication, These from the Land of Sinim (1901), is a sympathetic outline of the roots of the crisis of 1900, and a riposte to China’s Sinophobic opponents.

From the start the Service was British dominated, but there were enough non-Britons for Hart and others to boast of its cosmopolitanism. In the earliest available staff list (1873), fifty-eight Britons worked in the ‘indoor’-staff alongside fourteen French, eleven Germans, eight Americans, two Norwegians and two solitary Swiss and Russian employees. [6]  Between 1854 and the end of 1899 2,983 foreign men served out whole careers. 1,697 of these were British, 361 American, 288 German, 82 French, with the remainder from a number of European states. [7]  Between 1854 and the beginning of 1950 about 11,000 foreign men served in the Customs overall. About half of these were British, a tenth American, with a slightly smaller proportion of Germans, and the remainder from a number of European states, and 1,500 from Japan. Lower-ranking ‘outdoor’ posts were more likely to be recruited locally from the pool of foreign seamen that might be available, but appointments to the ‘indoor’ branch were more politicised. Decisions were taken at various times to appease specific national interests or pre-empt their expression. In 1874 four graduating students were recruited from Harvard. The previous year when Hart had sent a Customs team to the Vienna Exhibition he sent two Britons, one German and an American. The mixture sent a message.

The balance of nationalities was a sop to great power rivalry and self-importance – and not just great powers: by 1937 256 Norwegians had served or were still serving in the Customs. [8]  It also prevented it seeming too much a British service in Chinese eyes. The service also defended itself as a Chinese government agency from outside pressures, and it made a virtue of transparency from the start by always publishing the nationality, and latterly the Chinese home province, as part of men’s basic service details in the annual Service List. This multinational character was for Hart a key part in keeping the Customs independent. National favouritism was a regular complaint amongst personnel, but mostly amongst British personnel who felt that the balancing of national interests cut across the disinterested assessment of individual talents and experience, and service requirements. Despite their complaints, it was very much a Service British in character and personnel. One of the routine appointments was that of Cecil Arthur Verner Bowra (1869-1947), born in Ningbo, the son of E.C.M. Bowra, who served in the Customs from 1863 until his early death in 1874. In such circumstances Hart often found a billet in the Customs for a former colleague’s son. C.A.V. Bowra joined in 1886 as a 4th Assistant, B – the standard entry point for the Indoor (administrative) Staff -- rising steadily through the Service to become Chief Secretary from 1910 until 1923, and four times serving as Officiating Inspector-General when Sir Francis Aglen was on leave. Bowra was appointed Non-Resident (or London) Secretary from 1 January 1924, a post he held until October 1926. Bowra was a key senior figure in the 1911-27 Aglen Inspectorate, and his papers reflect that stature.

Two fundamental issues arose out of the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War which dislocated the Service that Hart had built up. First there was the loss of revenue. The Taiwan Customs stations were lost to Service control. Hart described the losses as ‘crippling’: in terms of revenue loss, and the concomitant decrease in the Office allowance which paid for the upkeep of the Service. [9]  The combined loss in revenues of the two ports represented 4.95% of total revenues of c.22m Haiguan Taels at 1893 levels. This was significant enough, although the opening of new ports by 1899 saw revenues grow to 27m Taels p.a., and the loss of the allowance was made up as early as 1896. [10]  The second issue was the impact of new indemnities and loans on Customs practice and perceptions of its role. There was a loss of Qing government autonomy as revenues were used or pledged to serve the loans raised to pay the war indemnity imposed by the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. At issue here were both the use of the Customs revenue as guarantee for the loans, and the recourse to the administration of the Customs Service itself as a factor in the loans – for example the stipulation in the 1896 Anglo-German Second Indemnity Loan that ‘the administration of the Imperial Maritime Customs of China shall continue as at present constituted during the currency of this loan’. Other loan palavers constantly revolved around reassigning control of the service in some form to the French, the Russians, or the Germans. [11]  The British felt they brought this to an end with the extraction of a promise that the IG-ship would remain in the hands of a Briton as long as British trade predominated. [12]

The spur to action had been the need to outmanoeuvre Russian attempts to tie control of the Customs to loan negotiations. [13]  The issue was apparently initially raised by the Foreign Office in May 1897 ‘as there was reason to expect an attempt to appoint some foreigner’.  [14]  The bewildering array of negotiations and agreements over loans and indemnities from 1894-1905 saw much by way of airy proposals to redraw the Customs map or overthrow its structure by way of security installing multinational boards of control, or different nationals at the top. Little actually came of this, but for Hart, looking back in 1903, the 1898 agreement ‘called too much attention to the post, and gave it a political character that I had always divested it of, and the intrigues for Boards, etc., have been the result’. [15]  But justifications for Britons to succeed to the post changed over the years, and an emphasis came instead to be placed on the ‘British’ nature of the Service, its working practices, and the predominance of the English language. Trade predominance was, naturally, a hostage to the changing fortunes of British enterprise in China, and the logic could propel a Japanese candidate to the fore. In the meantime Japanese diplomats were not alone in suggesting that other senior posts should be allotted to specific nationals.

Hart initially welcomed the Chinese commitment in 1898, but thought it:

a pity the Legation touched the question thus for every other Legation has a precedent and an opening: they can say “all right – let your I.G. always be British! But we demand that the Commissioner at Shanghai shall always be French – or at Tientsin German – or at Hankow Russian … or that there shall be such and such a Deputy I.G. etc etc. [16] 

And so they did. British merchants called for a British Commissioner in Shanghai in 1903. [17]  The Japanese demanded a Japanese Commissioner for Niuzhuang in December 1904. [18]  In 1906-07, and in 1911, there were moves to suggest that a German should be appointed DIG. [19]  Clarity on the issue was not helped by the fact that British diplomats in China and in London conducted two campaigns to prevent British individuals becoming IG. They successfully obstructed the appointment of Sir Robert Bredon, Hart’s son-in-law, in 1903, and again in 1907-10, although they later failed to prevent the appointment of Sir Frederick Maze, Hart’s nephew, instead of Arthur Edwardes in 1928-29. [20]  Hart’s complaints about the Foreign Office position were disingenuous – he had after all briefly accepted the position of British Minister to China in 1885, but turned it down stating that as IG he could ‘be most useful to England and certainly to China’. [21]  He knew how politicised the IG-ship was well before 1898.

As Hart’s long stewardship of the Service drew to a close, the reforming Qing, in its still under-appreciated decade of reform after the Boxer war debacle, revised the status of the Customs. In 1906 it established a Shuiwuju – Revenue Board – to oversee the Service. Before 1906 Hart reported directly to the Waiwubu, the late-Qing foreign ministry, and before that to the Zongli Yamen. By moving it to a position under a dedicated Customs board, which reported to the Ministry of Finance, the Qing rationalised and normalised the administrative place of the Service. They also signalled that it was office of the Chinese state. It was also seen, though, as a downgrading of its status, and of the status of the IG.  [22]

Robert Hart had been able to read his own obituary in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion when premature news of his death was published in London. [23]  He also read the encomiums published to mark his final departure from China in 1908, and while these have plenty of praise, there were also criticisms: autocracy, nepotism, ‘love of power’, and – repeatedly – his allegedly too-Chinese a perspective after so many years in Peking. [24]  All were agreed, however, that the Customs Service stood testament to Hart’s ‘genius’. It was ‘one of the most striking monuments every produced by the genius and labour of any individual Englishman’. [25]  For his successors, Sir Francis Aglen, and Sir Frederick Maze (Hart’s nephew to boot – there was no denying the nepotistic tendency), associating themselves with Hart’s legacy was a key part of their presentation of their administration, internally and externally.

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Endnotes:

1 Three introductory surveys are: Thomas P. Lyons, China Maritime Customs and China’s Trade Statistics 1859-1948  (Trumansberg: Willow Creek Press, 2003); S.F. Wright, The Origin and Development of the Chinese Customs service, 1843-1911: An historical outline (Shanghai: Privately printed, 1939); and L.K. Little, ‘Introduction’, to John King Fairbank, Katherine Frost Bruner, and Elizabeth Matheson (eds), The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907 volume 1, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp.1-34. Donna Maree Brunero, Britain's Imperial Cornerstone in China: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854-1949 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006) mostly deals with the Maze era. See also Hamashita Takeshi, Chugoku kindai keizaishi kenkyu: Shinmatsu kaikan zaisei to kaikoujou shijouken (Economic history of modern China: Maritime Customs finance and open port market zones in late Qing China) (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Toyo Bunka Kenkyujo 1989); Chen Shiqi, Zhongguo jindai haiguan shi (History of the modern Chinese Customs) (Peking: Renmin chubanshe, 2002).

2 Robert Ronald Campbell, James Duncan Campbell: A Memoir by his son (Cambridge MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1970)

3 Jack J. Gerson, Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British relations, 1854-1864 (Cambridge MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1972); Katherine Frost Bruner, John King Fairbank, Richard J. Smith (eds), Entering China’s Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854-1863 (Cambridge MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1986).

4 Wright, Origin and Development, pp. 46-7.

5 On Hart see: Stanley F. Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs (Belfast: Published for The Queen’s University, Belfast, 1950); Bruner, Fairbank, Smith (eds), Entering China’s Service; Richard J. Smith, John King Fairbank, and Katherine Frost Bruner (eds), Robert Hart and China’s Modernization: His Journals, 1863-1866 (Cambridge MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1991); Frank H. H. King, ‘Hart, Sir Robert, first baronet (1835–1911)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33739]. There are two popular biographies: his niece Juliet Bredon’s, Sir Robert Hart: The Romance of a Great Career (London: Hutchinson, 1909); and Stanley Bell, Hart Of Lisburn. Northern Ireland. The Story of Sir Robert Hart (Lisburn: Lisburn Historical Press, 1985).

6 A list of the Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners 30 June 1873, Enclosure 2 in Circular 20, 1873, 1 December 1873, pp. Inspector General’s Circulars. First Series: 1861-1875, Shanghai, Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General, 1879, pp. 468-73.

7 Figures here and below extrapolated from a dataset of all Service-listed Customs careers compiled from Customs Service Lists, 1854-1948: http://www.bris.ac.uk/history/customs/resources/servicelists.html.

8 S. Hopstock, Norwegian Members of the Chinese Customs Service (Shanghai: privately printed, 1937) http://www.bris.ac.uk/history/customs/resources/servicelists.html#NorwegianCustoms.

9 I.G. in Peking, letter 969, 21 April 1895. (SOAS Hart papers: PPMS 67 Box 3, folder 16). His gloomy assessment was based on the proposed cession of Niuzhuang as well, which was not followed up.

10 Chinese Maritime Customs Project, Customs Revenue Dataset.

11 See I.G. in Peking, letter 1011, 8 March 1896. ( SOAS Hart papers. PPMS 67 Box 3, folder 17). J.D. Campbell claimed to have originated this stipulation: Campbell to Hart letter 2477, 3 April 1896, Chen and Han (eds), Archives of China’s Imperial Maritime Customs, vol.III.

12 English text in Documents Illustrative of the Origin, Development, and Activities of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (Shanghai, 1937 - 1940), vol. VI, pp. 597-8. CC336.26 /139311 There was less clarity, it seems, in the Chinese translation: Morrison to Chirol, 25 June 1907, in Lo Hui-min (ed.), The Correspondence of G.E. Morrison, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp.420-21.

13 L.K. Young, British policy in China, 1895-1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp.51-63.

14 TNA, FO288/3740, 5A 1928, ‘British objections to Sir R. Bredon’s appointment as Inspector-General of Customs’, Sterndale Bennett note 21 May 1928.

15 I.G. in Peking, letter 1278, 18 April 1903. (SOAS Hart papers.  PPMS 67 Box 4 folder 22)

16 I.G. in Peking, letter 2697, 22 May 1898. (SOAS Hart papers.  PPMS 67 Box 4, folder 19)

17 Chen Xiafei and Han Rongfang (eds), Archives of China’s Imperial Maritime Customs (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1990), vol.III, Campbell to Hart, letter 3144, 10 April 1903.

18 I.G. in Peking, letter 1354, 11 December 1904. ( SOAS Hart papers.  PPMS 67 Box, folder)

19 Morrison to Braham, 26 September 1911, Lo (ed.), Correspondence of G.E. Morrison, vol.I, p. 631.

20 TNA, FO288/3740, 5A 1928, ‘British objections to Sir R. Bredon’s appointment as Inspector-General of Customs’, Sterndale Bennett note 21 May 1928.

21 Telegram to Sir Julian Pauncefote, 31 August 1885, Documents Illustrative of the Origin, Development, and Activities of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (Shanghai, 1937 - 1940), vol. VII, 116. CC336.26 /139311

22 Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs, pp. 824-30.

23 The Times, 17 July 1900, p. 4; 21 September 1911, p. 3.

24 He ‘had become over-proficient in the art of yielding’ remarked the editorial marking his departure in The Times, 23 April 1908, p. 7.

25 NCH, 23 September 1911, p. 737; The Times, 17 July 1900, p. 4, quoting an 1899 report.